Affiliate Marketing – How To Make A Side Income!
You may have come across the phrase affiliate marketing while reading articles about blogging, or eCommerce, or about people learning how to make a side income online. In whatever context you read about it, you most likely asked yourself the question, what is affiliate marketing? And, how does it work? Here we will explain exactly what it is and the basics you need to know if you would like to do the same.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is when a person (known as an affiliate) promotes a company’s or a person’s product or service, and they earn a commission for doing so. This marketing technique isn’t exactly new, and it has helped a number of people quit their mundane jobs and use affiliate marketing to make an income. It provides them with the opportunity to work from anywhere they want and at any time, making a decent living.
Chances are, you’ve already bought products before through an affiliate without even knowing it. The affiliate finds a product online that they've used and believe in, promote this to others, and get paid a commission for every sale.
How Much Money Can You Make From Affiliate Marketing?
It depends on the effort and time dedicated to building your affiliate marketing business. Your income may vary depending on the affiliate products you promote, and if you learn and become good at marketing then you can earn a decent income. Some affiliate products offer a 10 percent commission per sale, and others offer all the way up to 80 percent! So, it’s really about finding the right product, and more importantly, understanding your target audience and how to drive traffic to the product.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
To earn an income from affiliate marketing you first need to partner with a company to sell their products. You do this by either joining an affiliate program or by contacting the vendor directly. Preferably their product is one which you have tried and liked, it’s not a must, but it would make your recommendations and tone much more sincere since it’s something you would actually use or buy. Then you learn marketing and drive traffic to the product. If your target audience clicks on your affiliate link and buys the product, you get a commission.
To start reaping the rewards, there are a few steps you should take. You should choose a niche you are interested in which you feel you can drive traffic to the products. You need to find an affiliate program to register with which has a selection of products you are interested in promoting. Then, you need to generate traffic and a good practice is to capture your target audiences' email addresses. This will allow you to build a relationship with them to build your business and generate income over time.
Finding The Right Niche
There are three main things to consider when determining the right niche for you. What are you passionate about and what is your expertise?, where is there a big demand? and where is there little supply?.
The evergreen niches, meaning there will always be a demand, are Health, Wealth and Relationship. Hence, you can expect a number of people promoting products in these niches but the market size is extensive so not to worry.
Health and Wellness products are as popular as beauty products. People want to buy supplements to stay in better shape and get improved performance out of their bodies, and you can find a wide range of products to use as an affiliate, from weight loss to eating healthy. This variety gives you a chance to improve your commissions, if you know how to genuinely promote these products to your audience.
If you spend any time online throughout the day, chances are you stumble upon a lot of dog and cat videos. Pets can be a very rewarding niche, and it’s one that millions of people are interested in. There are a lot of pet owners out there, and they all want the best for their pets. So, through affiliate marketing, you can promote foods, clothes, supplements, hygiene products, and a million other things that a pet needs.
Alternatively, you may select other niches such as Do It Yourself (DIY), Spirituality, Software etc., just select the niche which you have an interest for.
As earlier mentioned it is important to select a niche you are passionate about or have an expertise for, this will keep you creating marketing content and promoting products during the ups and downs.
Affiliate Programs
Once you have decided on your niche, it is time to get involved with an affiliate program. An affiliate program is a site that lists affiliate products that you can promote and link to in your marketing content.
These networks simply offer publishers and people who want to be affiliates, access to a lot of different affiliate products online. There are hundreds of different ones out there that can get you started, but which ones should you consider a closer look?
ShareASale should definitely be among your first options, because it’s basically one of the oldest players in the game and they have some pretty remarkable experience when it comes to affiliate marketing. Their diversity is also a very notable feature that separates them from much of the competition, with close to 4,000 different affiliate products in up to 40 categories. They’re consistent with their payments, and they have had an excellent track record with zero customer complaints.
ClickBank, on the other hand, is even older than ShareASale, and they offer up to 6 million different affiliate products, so it’s a safe bet that you’re going to find your niche somewhere in there. They’ve also built quite a decent reputation with no customer complaints, and they have some very cool options that might make a difference for a lot of people. ClickBank offers flexible payment schedules, which means you can get paid weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly if you want to; definitely a great feature for those who might be needing the money more frequently.
You have those options, which are great, and then there’s Amazon Associates that has been around since 1996. To say you have access to a huge variety of products would be an understatement, since you’ll be dealing with Amazon’s mammoth of an inventory, with over 600 million products.
Traffic Sources
Now that you have a niche to create content around and have selected an affiliate program to promote products, all you need now is to get people to click on your affiliate links and buy the products! But, how do you do this?
Making money through affiliate marketing is a numbers game. The more targeted traffic you draw to your content, the more clicks you will get on your affiliate links. The more clicks, the more conversion to leads and sales you will get. So, drawing people to your content is key. The way you do this is through utilizing a traffic source or, better yet, multiple traffic sources.
Google Ads – Google is the world’s most used search engine with over a 90% market share worldwide. Using Google Ads is a great way to drive traffic to your content. With Google Ads, you can target your content to the best demographics, locations, keyword searches, or even certain devices. They also offer great analytics to understand how effective your spending here is.
Social Media – Social media marketing is also huge for affiliate marketers. Using Ads on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, or whatever your preferred platform is, you can do the same targeted traffic-building. If you are just starting out and your budget is very small, you can even get some good traffic for free through social media.
One digital advertising technique a lot of people seem to neglect, despite its efficiency, is email marketing. By capturing and sending emails to your target audience, you can generate sales from your affiliate products. The thing about email marketing is, it’s personal, and the approach is very specific. This is why a lot of people are inclined to open those emails and even click on a link to your website.
Why Use A Landing Page?
A landing page is a one page, standalone website. It is simple and involves a call to action that should make visitors do what you need them to do. This can be to click a link, enter their email, or make a purchase.
An affiliate marketer must have a great landing page, it is essential. If designed correctly, it will help your business tremendously. A good landing page will inspire action from the consumer and also build trust, credibility and improve the overall experience of their interaction with your marketing.
With the right funnel builder software to easily create your landing pages, can be the difference between a method which generates sales and one which is not converting leads to customers.
The Importance Of An Auto-Responder
Once you have started seeing results, getting visitors to click your affiliate links, then capturing email addresses is where the opportunity for a substantial amount of passive income comes into play. With an auto-responder is how you can accomplish this.
An auto-responder will send out e-mail messages to your email list at set intervals. Once you have a persons email address, you can set an auto-responder to send a thank you or welcome message right away. A short time later you can send an additional coupon code (with one of your affiliate links). After that, you can send an invitation to follow you on social media or introduce them to a new product. And so on, and so forth. This is the key to taking your affiliate marketing from a solid money-making venture to a substantial passive income generator.
Analytics - Know Your Numbers
One more thing you need to master is analytics tools and how to use them. These tools will help you keep track of the data you need for your affiliate marketing business, and you’ll be able to understand exactly which strategies work and which don’t in your quest to reach more people online.
That way, you’ll get to improve your performance and start creating content that will be more interesting for your audience, and you’ll do so based on the data you gathered.
To do that, though, you need to use tools like Google Analytics, which is a web analytics tool that will help you have access to more data to improve performance and increase traffic to your website. Using this tool, you’ll also be able to find out which of your traffic sources isn’t optimized enough through your affiliate program, so you’d fix the problem and get leads. Another popular analytics tool is called ClickMagick. It helps you to scientifically track and optimize all your marketing, all in one place and get more leads, conversions and revenues from the same traffic you're already getting. It tracks your entire sales funnel, no matter how complex. You can perform split testing, re-targeting pixels to any click and integrates with affiliate networks with ease.
Final Thoughts
Affiliate marketing will continue to be used to get products to market, and there is a growing awareness of it's benefits. It’s not as easy as it may seem, but with focused effort and some careful planning, you could be making a side income from the comfort of your home, or any other place for that matter.